Reconfigurable morphological image processing accelerator for video object segmentation

Video object segmentation is an important pre-processing task for many video analysis systems. To achieve the requirement of real-time video analysis, hardware acceleration is required. In this paper, after analyzing existing video object segmentation algorithms, it is found that most of the core operations can be implemented with simple morphology operations. Therefore, with the concepts of morphological image processing element array and stream processing, a reconfigurable morphological image processing accelerator is proposed, where by the proposed instruction set, the operation of each processing element can be controlled, and the interconnection between processing elements can also be reconfigured. Simulation results show that most of the core operations of video object segmentation can be supported by the accelerator by only changing the instructions. A prototype chip is designed to support real-time change-detection-and-background-registration based video object segmentation algorithm. This chip incorporates eight macro processing elements and can support a processing capacity of 6,200 9-bit morphological operations per second on a SIF image. Furthermore, with the proposed tiling and pipelined-parallel techniques, a real-time watershed transform can be achieved using 32 macro processing elements. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.